Roger Sandall 1933-2012

A NATIONAL TREASURE?

Roger was a film-maker but his career came to a premature end under strange circumstances when his records of Aboriginal ceremonies were literally put into cold storage and banned from exhibition. He became a prolific reviewer and essayist as he languished with no official role or function in the Department of Anthropology at the University of Sydney. Check out his website!

He made his debut in cyberspace in the Guestroom of my site which started in 2003, it is an old platform and seriously corrupted. Work is underway to transfer the content to a new site.

This is his essay Facelifting the Stone Age (sadly corrupted in part) which is very topical at present. He describes the rise and fall of his film-making as the realism of his records fell foul of the modern progressive desire to clean up the record.

FROM THE ESSAY

The reasons once given for deep-freezing the films were plausible. They dealt with secret/sacred subject matter which some rural Aborigines felt sensitive about at the time. There were also others in the Northern Territory who were unsure exactly what was supposed to be secret and what wasn't, and for safety's sake preferred to have the films withdrawn. At the same time political activists and urban Aborigines were discovering the exciting connections between secrecy, power, the cash nexus, and mythology both genuine and contrived.

I would argue here however that these original reasons for prohibiting the use of the films have long been superseded and eclipsed. The censorship they suffer from today has a more obvious political explanation -- the need to avoid and evade, to suppress and dissemble and deny whole areas of ethnographic reality which were formerly well known, romanticising and prettifying their bloodier practices or disturbing sexual features to satisfy middle-class taste. The aim is to produce a Wadaingula-free world with all the nasties cosmetically airbrushed away -- a world where Aboriginal mythology has been detoxed, bowdlerised, Disneyfied, and made safe for children's picture books telling pretty tales about the Dreamtime. In this cleaned-up version of Aboriginal culture Wadaingula and his deplorable habits have no place at all.

When she learned what the Institute's films contained -- this was some twenty years ago -- a part-Aboriginal woman with no experience whatever of tribal life, but who is now a professor and widely regarded as an authority on ethnographic matters, expressed shock and downright disbelief that such things were part of "her culture". She evidently felt that it would have been better if the films had not been made, better if there were no such records of the past. The energetic promotion of "black culture" around which she was successfully building her career made them highly inconvenient.